There is a well‐known argument against irreducibly normative properties that appeals to the following claim about supervenience: for all possible worlds W and W*, if the instantiation of descriptive properties in W and W* is exactly the same, then the instantiation of normative properties in W and W* is also exactly the same. This claim used to be uncontroversial, but recently several philosophers have challenged it. Do these challenges undermine this argument? I argue that they do not, since the negation (...) of this claim about supervenience has consequences that are much more implausible than the negations of key premises in these challenges. (shrink)

This thesis is a defense of (a version of) moral perceptualism. Moral perceptualism (MP), as is generally understood, advocates the bold view that “moral properties can be perceptual content”; its supporters include Audi (2013, 2015), Lord (2018), McNaughton (1988), McBrayer (2010a, 2010b), Cowan (2015), and Werner (2016, 2020b). In support of MP, Werner (2016) bolsters what he calls ‘phenomenal contrast arguments(PCAs)’. According to PCAs, the best explanation for inter-subjective phenomenal contrast between two subjects facing the same moral situation is that (...) one subject has moral perceptual experience(s) of moral properties, whereas the other does not. If PCAs are sound, then MP can be justified (in that one subject does perceive moral properties). However, some powerful counterarguments against MP have been proposed by Väyrynen(2018), Reiland(2021), and Chudnoff(2015); each of them provides competing explanations for inter-subjective phenomenal contrast and argues that their explanations are more reasonable than PCAs. My purposes in this thesis are to ascertain (I) which explanation for inter-subjective phenomenal contrast is more reasonable; (II) (how) could moral perceptualists like Werner (2016, 2020b) properly reply to the counterarguments against MP？ Or is there any better alternative explanation that could support MP？ As regards (I), I will argue that Väyrynen’s(2018), Reiland’s(2021), and Chudnoff's (2015) alternative explanatory models for inter-subjective phenomenal contrast are not to be seen as competing explanations against the one provided by MP; rather, they are complementary to it. As regards (II), I argue that Väyrynen’s(2018), Reiland’s(2021), and Chudnoff's (2015) conterarguments against MP at most demonstrate that certain moral properties (e.g., rightness/ wrongness/goodness/badness) can’t be part of the perceptual content, but their arguments do not (or indeed cannot) rule out the possibility that moral salience can be properly construed as part of the perceptual content. In light of this, I argue that an alternative version of moral perceptualism, or what I call ‘moral salience perceptualism’, according to which “moral salience can be part of the perceptual content”, still remains alive and kicking in face of their counteraguments. Moreover, I argue that moral salience perceptualism is explanatorily superior to Werner’s (2016) version of MP in terms of explaining inter-subjective phenomenal contrast. -/- Keywords： moral perceptualism, phenomenal contrast, moral salience, moral experiences, moral judgments -/- . (shrink)

We seem to be able to acquire evaluative knowledge by mere reflection, or “from the armchair.” But how? This question is especially pressing for proponents of sentimental perceptualism, which is the view that our evaluative knowledge is rooted in affective experiences in much the way that everyday empirical knowledge is rooted in perception. While such empirical knowledge seems partially explained by causal relations between perceptions and properties in the world, in armchair evaluative inquiry, the relevant evaluative properties are typically not (...) even present. The paper shows how sentimental perceptualists can ultimately provide a broadly causal explanation of our reflective evaluative knowledge. (shrink)

Debates on moral enhancement focus legitimate attention on the questions of whether it is possible and/or what could count as a moral enhancement given deep ethical disagreement. I argue here that moral enhancements might not even be rational to consider—from the perspective of the agent. At issue is the assessment of whether the enhancement is truly reliable. Since we assess reliable belief forming processes by their outputs, whether they are true, an agent who is entertaining a putative moral enhancement faces (...) a trilemma. If she already believes the promised outputs of the enhancement, the enhancement is obsolete. If she does not believe the promised outputs, it would be irrational from her current perspective to undertake the “enhancement.” If she is uncertain, she has no reason for thinking that the enhancement truly augments her moral beliefs. On any option, the agent has no reason for taking a putative moral enhancement. (shrink)

In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this paper, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism. We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau's comparison between what they call the “perceptual practice” and the “moral intuition practice”, which we take to raise some difficult (...) normative and meta‐normative questions for theorists of all stripes. (shrink)

Moral perceptualism is the view that perceptual experience is attuned to pick up on moral features in our environment, just as it is attuned to pick up on mundane features of an environment like textures, shapes, colors, pitches, and timbres. One important family of views that incorporate moral perception are those of virtue theorists and sensibility theorists. On these views, one central ability of the virtuous agent is her sensitivity to morally relevant features of situations, where this sensitivity is often (...) spoken of in perceptual terms. However, sensibility theorists have often not been careful to specify how to understand their claims about moral sensibilities as perceptual. In this paper, we distinguish between what we call Attentional Moral Perception and Contentful Moral Perception. We argue that sensibility theorists should endorse Attentional Moral Perception, because it has very powerful empirical evidence in its favor, and it can play all of the explanatory roles that the sensibility theorist needs in her theory of moral sensibilities. (shrink)

This book draws on Iris Murdoch's philosophy to explore questions related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages with Murdoch's ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the importance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies. Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention. Not only our actions (...) and choices, but the possibilities we choose among, and even the meaning what we perceive, are to a large extent determined by whether we pay attention, and what we attend do. In this way, the book argues that attention is fundamental, though often overlooked, in morality. While the book's discussion of attention revolves primarily around Murdoch's thought, it also engages significantly with Simone Weil, who introduced the concept of attention in a spiritual context. The book also engages with contemporary debates concerning moral perception and motivation, empirical psychology, animal ethics, and Buddhist philosophy. The Ethics of Attention will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, ethics and moral psychology, and the philosophy of attention. (shrink)

One solution to the problem of moral knowledge is to claim that we can acquire it a posteriori through moral experience. But what is a moral experience? When we examine the most compelling putative cases, we find features which, I argue, are best explained by the hypothesis that moral experiences are emotions. To preempt an objection, I argue that putative cases of emotionless moral experience can be explained away. Finally, I allay the worry that emotions are an unsuitable basis for (...) moral knowledge. I conclude that those who believe in moral experience should hold that it consists of emotion. (shrink)

Moral perceptualism is the theory that perception and perceptual experience is attuned to moral features in our environment. This idea has received renewed attention in the last 15–20 years, for its potential to do theoretical work in moral epistemology and moral psychology. In this paper, I review the main motivations and arguments for moral perceptualism, the variety of theories that go under the heading of “moral perception,” and the three biggest challenges to moral perception. https://youtu.be/9cc_1zykq80.

This chapter corrects for Susan Sontag's undeserved neglect by contemporary moral philosophers by bringing awareness to some of the unique metaethical insights born of her reflections on photographic representations of evil. I argue that Sontag's thought provides fertile ground for thinking about: (1) moral perception and its relation to moral knowledge; and (2) the epistemic and moral value of our emotional responses to the misery and suffering of others. I show that, contrary to standard moral perception theory (e.g. Blum 1994), (...) Sontag holds that we can have general moral perceptual knowledge. I then explore Sontag's idea that certain emotional responses, like sympathy and compassion, can sometimes be impertinent, in virtue of their having false or illusory content. I explain why this is so, and show the epistemic and motivational problems it poses for moral sentimentalism. (shrink)

Moral perception has made something of a comeback in recent work on moral epistemology. Many traditional objections to the view have been argued to fail upon closer inspection. But it remains an open question just how far moral perception might extend. In this paper, I provide the beginnings of an answer to this question by assessing the relationship between the metaphysical structure of different normative properties and a plausible constraint on which properties are eligible for perceptual awareness which I call (...) the Counterfactual Strengthening Test. Along the way I consider and reject a few other possible constraints on perceptual awareness. I defend the view that moral perception is restricted to the perception of evaluative and pro tanto deontic properties. I conclude with a few gestures toward what this limitation on moral perception may mean for broader moral epistemology. (shrink)

Do we perceptually experience moral properties like rightness and wrongness? For example, as in Gilbert Harman’s classic case, when we see a group of young hoodlums pour gasoline on a cat and ignite it, can we, in the same robust sense, see the action’s wrongness?. Many philosophers have recently discussed this question, argued for a positive answer and/or discussed its epistemological implications. This paper presents a new case for a negative answer by, first, getting much clearer on how such experience (...) could be possible at all; second, responding to the only argument for a positive answer; and, finally, arguing that postulation of such experience is explanatorily redundant. (shrink)

This paper explores the epistemological significance of the view that we can literally see, hear, and touch evaluative properties (the high-level theory of value perception). My central contention is that, from the perspective of epistemology, the question of whether there are such high-level experiences doesn’t matter. Insofar as there are such experiences, they most plausibly emerged through the right kind of interaction with evaluative capacities that are not literally perceptual (e.g., of the sort involved in imaginative evaluative reflection). But even (...) if these other evaluative capacities turn out not to alter the content of perceptual experience, they would still be sufficient to do all of the justificatory work that high-level experiences are meant to do. I close by observing that it may matter a great deal whether a certain other picture of value perception is true. This alternative picture has it that desires and/or emotions are perceptual-like experiences of value. (shrink)

We often claim to know about what is good or bad, right or wrong. But how do we know such things? Both historically and today, answers to this question have most commonly been rationalist or sentimentalist in nature. Rationalists and sentimentalists clash over whether intellect or affect is the foundation of our evaluative knowledge. This paper is about the form that this dispute takes among those who agree that evaluative knowledge depends on perceptual-like evaluative experiences. Rationalist proponents of perceptualism invoke (...) intellectual experiences, while sentimentalist proponents invoke affective experiences. The goal of this paper is to offer a fresh strategy for adjudicating between intellectual and sentimental perceptualism. I argue that the perceptualist’s hand will be forced either in the direction of intellectual or sentimental perceptualism once she decides between two views about the modal status of our basic evaluative knowledge. I close with an argument that the more plausible of the two options is the one which fits best with sentimental perceptualism. The argument, then, is that perceptualists ought to be sentimentalists. (shrink)

This paper concerns what I take to be the primary epistemological motivation for defending moral perception. Offering a plausible account of how we gain moral knowledge is one of the central challenges of metaethics. It seems moral perception might help us meet this challenge. The possibility that we know about the instantiation of moral properties in something like the way we know that there is a bus passing in front of us raises the alluring prospect of subsuming moral epistemology under (...) the comfortable umbrella of perceptual or, more broadly, empirical knowledge. The good news on this front is that various combinations of metaethical positions and theories of perception arguably have the potential to vindicate moral perception. The bad news, I’ll argue, is that moral perception would be dependent for its epistemic merit on background knowledge of bridge principles linking moral and non-moral properties. Thus, in order to defend a purely perceptual moral epistemology, one would have to argue that knowledge of those principles is likewise perceptual. I further argue it is not. (shrink)

Recently, in metaethics, several authors have taken into account the view according to which moral knowledge can be based on perceptual or quasi-perceptual experience. This kind of knowledge is defined as moral perception. This paper aims to introduce the recent debate about moral perception. Specifically, the possibility of moral perception will be discussed, and many different views of moral perception will be compared.

You might bear witness to some injustice, but can you witness the injustice itself? At first glance, it’s tempting to say “yes.” Sometimes we see things that provoke an immediate judgement that some act is wrong just as we sometimes see things that provoke the immediate judgement that e.g. the book is red or that our friend is angry. It seems like we perceive the injustice just as we perceive the redness or the anger. Natural as that position is, I (...) argue that it is a mistake and that those who have adopted it often confuse the perception of moral properties with the perception of morally relevant properties. (shrink)

Keskityn siihen miten Leibnizilla yksittäiset mielihyvän tai mielipahan tiedostamattomat havainnot voivat kasautua tai tiivistyä ja muodostaa vähitellen tunteita, joista tulemme tietoisiksi.

According to a posteriori ethical intuitionism, perceptual experiences can provide non-inferential justification for at least some moral beliefs. Moral epistemology, for the defender of AEI, is less like the epistemology of math and more like the epistemology of tables and chairs. One serious threat to AEI comes from the phenomenon of cognitive penetration. The worry is that even if evaluative properties could figure in the contents of experience, they would only be able to do so if prior cognitive states influence (...) perceptual experience. Such influences would undermine the non-inferential, foundationalist credentials of AEI. In this paper, I defend AEI against this objection. Rather than deny that cognitive penetration exists, I argue that some types of cognitive penetrability are actually compatible with AEI's foundationalist structure. This involves teasing apart the question of whether some particular perceptual process has justification-conferring features from the question of how it came to have those features in the first place. Once this distinction is made, it becomes clear that some kinds of cognitive penetration are compatible with the non-inferential status of moral perceptual experiences as the proponent of AEI claims. (shrink)

Proponents of impure moral perception claim that, while there are perceptual moral experiences, these experiences epistemically depend on a priori moral knowledge. Proponents of pure moral perception claim that moral experiences can justify independently of substantive a priori moral knowledge. Some philosophers, most notably David Faraci, have argued that the pure view is mistaken, since moral perception requires previous moral background knowledge, and such knowledge could not itself be perceptual. I defend pure moral perception against this objection. I consider two (...) ways to understand the notion of “background knowledge” that is crucial to the objection. On a reading, the claim that background knowledge is necessary for moral perception is likely false. On a second and weaker reading, the claim is true, but the background knowledge in question could be perceptual, and thus compatible with pure moral perception. Thus, the objection fails. (shrink)

Moral perception, for the purposes of this article, is taken to be the perception of moral properties, unless contexts dictate otherwise. While both particularists and generalists agree that we can perceive the moral properties of an action or a feature, they disagree, however, over whether rules play any essential role in moral perception. The particularists argue for a ‘no’ answer, whereas the generalists say ‘yes’. In this paper, I provide a limited defense of particularism by rebutting several powerful generalist arguments. (...) It is hoped particularism can thus be made more attractive as a theory of moral perception. Positive arguments for particularism will also be provided along the way. (shrink)